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A student pushes Chance Hawkins down the hallway at Dunbar High in Fort Worth.

When KERA News first met Chance Hawkins, he was getting ready to start ninth grade at Fort Worth’s Dunbar High School. He’s now a junior. He has all the junior year challenges of his classmates, but his personal challenge is even bigger. He’s a battling a degenerative muscle disease. And that makes life more complicated.

Chance will be the first to tell you that he doesn’t dwell on what he can’t do.

That he can’t walk. That he can’t get up without the help of an aide. That he can’t get ready for school every morning without his big brother right there with him, cleaning his face with a washcloth or putting toothpaste on a toothbrush.

“I know nobody in this world is perfect, and God didn’t it want it to perfect,” Chance says. “Because if it was perfect, everybody would just feel like ‘Oh, we all perfect, so we all have nothing to worry about.’”

Chance has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare genetic disorder that affects one in 3,600 boys. Over time, the muscles progressively weaken. In most cases, death comes by age 25.